Researchers at Wake Forest University studied whether just four days of training (at just 20 minutes a day) could make a difference in participants’ mood, energy, and cognition. Undergraduate students (average age 22 years) either participated in the meditation sessions or spent a similar amount of time sitting quietly and listening to an audio book.

Participants in the meditation condition showed decreases in anxiety and improvements in several mental processing tasks compared to those in the audio book group. The meditators’ performance on one aspect of a working memory task (how many answers they got correct in a row) suggested that they may have improved their attention.

This is a small and very preliminary study that extends others’ work on meditation and the brain.It shows that even brief meditation practice can make a difference. you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to learn to still your mind and pay better attention. Paying attention may be one of the most important things you can do to improve your brain’s functioning.

Reference:

Zeidan F et al.(in press) Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training. Consciousness and Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.014

The study, reported in the journal Nature, highlights the problem called generalization. Most studies of computer-based brain training have shown, for example, that people can readily learn to do better on the tasks on which they train, People who work on learning how to remember a list of words will usually get better at it. If you train at solving mazes, you will probably get better at solving a maze puzzle.

What’s not clear, though, is that the training you do will help you on other things. You can learn a list of words and that may help you memorize a grocery list, but all that work probably won’t help you remember where you put your keys, or help you do better on a test for your job. In the same way, you may get pretty good at solving a maze, but it not likely that will help you be a better driver.

In the study reported in Nature, viewers of a popular BBC television show names “Bang Goes the Theory” participated in six weeks of online brain training. Participants completed baseline measure of reasoning, working memory, and paired associates learning and were randomly assigned to different training groups. Participants were aged 18 to 60 years, and 11,430 completed enough of the training to contribute data.

What did the study show? Consistent with a great deal of other research, the study showed that people who trained got better on the tasks they trained on, but there was essentially no evidence that they got better on the baseline tasks. The authors of the study give an illustration: people in the memory training group improved in their ability to remember numbers by about 3/100 (three hundredths) of a digit. They suggest that it would take almost four years of training to remember just one extra digit. Further, the control group in the study got better by 2/100 (two hundredths), and they didn’t even get memory training.

There are a number of legitimate criticisms of the study.Researchers could argue about the selection of tests, how participants were trained, and the small amount of training completed by some of the participants. Including a large age range may have masked improvements in some groups, such as older adults.

As always, more research is needed. But this study shows that at least short-term computer-based brain training may not make a big difference in daily life.

Reference:

Owen AM et al. Putting brain training to the test. Nature near-final version, 20 April 2010 (doi:10.1038/nature09042). Click here to go to the report.

Self-training vs. training with a coach has advantages and disadvantages. The advantages of having a trainer are fairly clear: he or she can help you spot your weaknesses and strengths and develop a program to develop areas you need to work on. Disadvantages are that first you have to find a good trainer and usually you have to pay them for individualized coaching.Another disadvantage may be that a trainer, or a personalized training program, may be hard to find in your area. Although brain fitness programs are being developed in many areas of the country, most people don’t have easy access.

Online training programs can help to address the shortage. Programs like Lumosity, Dakim, CogniFit, and Posit all provide users with somewhat individualized computer-based training programs.Some programs do a better job of evaluating your strengths and weaknesses before you start training (for example, CogniFit does several sessions of testing before you start training), and all of them tailor the difficulty to training to your needs.

What should you look for in a brain fitness trainer, even if you can find one? I’d argue that you need someone with a strong background in cognitive evaluations, such as a clinical neuropsychologist. He or she may be helpful in helping you find out what your strengths and weaknesses are, how they relate to your everyday life, and what kind of training may be helpful.

Training philosophy may be important as well. If you believe that brain fitness requires more than computer-based training and includes things like aerobic exercise, strength training, stress management, and diet, you may need to find someone with a broad background. Many personal fitness trainers may know about some of these other elements.

A brain fitness trainer should be able to help you with all the elements of brain fitness. Even if he or she isn’t knowledgeable about all of them, your program should include all of them. For true brain fitness training, you may need help from several trainers.

The mice who ran performed much better on several tasks that required that they tell the difference between two visual patterns.The effect of running was very clear in adult mice. In mice who were very old, though, running didn’t make much difference, and they didn’t get much boost from the exercise.

John Grohol at PsychCentral also posted about the article, noting that some newspaper accounts barely mentioned the fact that the study was done with mice. He even points out that it was done with a specific variety of mice, and suggests that the relevance of the study may be limited. It’s true that it is very hard to know whether studies about mice really mean much for humans, since findings in animals often don’t generalize to humans.

As Grohol notes, the research is pretty clear that exercise can improve cognitive functioning in people as well as animals.But I’m not as concerned as he is that the results of this study will only apply to one strain of mice. Animal research has its problems when we apply it to human research, but in this case studies in humans have consistently shown similar results to those in animals. It may still be true that the reasons for changes in cognitive function in humans and animals may be different, but that means we would have to come up with two separate mechanisms for change. That’s actually making the situation more, rather than less, complex.

Dr Grohol makes an excellent point about human and animal research. Too often, we jump from preliminary findings to the real world. In areas in which animal and human studies generally agree,though, animals studies can extend and help find new directions for research at considerably less cost than similar studies in humans.

Reference:

Creer DJ et al. Running enhances spatial pattern separation in mice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online first January 19,2010 doi:10.1073/pnas.0911725107

A recent study in the Archives of Neurology shows that muscle strength is related to risk for Alzheimer’s disease. In a group of persons with an average age of 80 years, those with the greatest muscle strength had the lowest chance of developing Alzheimer’s over up to six years. About one in five of the people with the lowest muscle strength (the lowest 10%) developed Alzheimer’s disease over the study follow up, while fewer than one in ten of those with the greatest strength (the highest 10%) developed Alzheimer’s in the same time – about half the risk.

Does this mean that weight training will keep you from getting Alzheimer’s or other memory problems? It’s not clear. Endurance training has been shown to increase brain-derived neurotrophic growth factor (BDNF), a substance that facilitates the growth of new nerve cells in the brain. This increase in BDNF may be part of the reason why exercise improves cognition. But a recent study of weight training with middle-aged men and women didn’t show any change in BDNF with weight training.

Given the association of mood, cognition, and loss of muscle tissue in frailty (see another blog post about frailty here), though, maintaining muscle mass through weight training may be an important way to maintain and improve physical and cognitive functioning.

References:

Boyle PA, et al. (2009). Association of muscle strength with the risk of Alzheimer disease and rate of cognitive decline in community-dwelling older persons. Archives of Neurology, 66, 1339-1344.

Levinger I, et al. (2008). BDNF, metabolic risk factors, and resistance training in middle-aged individuals. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 40, 535-541.